Unofficial news and tips about Google

July 21, 2008

Better Comment Moderation in Blogger

Blogger doesn't do too much to prevent comment spam. You can enable word verification and annoy your readers, moderate the comments and remove the instant feedback or disable the comments. Until recently, I didn't use any of these options and I manually deleted spam comments one by one, but this becomes excruciating when you have to delete hundreds of comments. So I enabled CAPTCHAs and made it more difficult to post comments.

If you decided that moderating comments is the best way to deal with spam, there's a new option to enable comment moderation only for old posts. I'm not sure if Blogger's default value of 14 days is the best option, but you can change it to any other number. This way your readers will be able to comment on the recent posts without moderation, while the visitors who find older posts using search engines or links from other sites will need to wait until you approve their comments.

Blogger > Settings > Comments

Moderating comments (Blogger can't detect identical comments)

I still think that Blogger needs better tools to filter comment spam and I'm surprised to see that Google can't come up with a real solution like Akismet. The spam filter could also be used in Google Groups, orkut and other community sites.